Circling the Sun (36 page)

D
enys was between safaris, and there was a window, a very small one, for the two of us to go out alone. We made for southern Masailand, aiming at the Mara River with a team of Africans including Denys’s man, Billea, and a Kikuyu boy, Kamau, he often travelled with. It was impossibly dry, and yet past Lake Province we saw countless animals—buffalo and rhino and shaggy lion, gazelles of every shade and variety. The golden slopes and shimmering flatlands swarmed with life.

Denys was most himself in wild places. Through a pair of smudgy field glasses, he could gauge a set of kudu horns, or the weight of still hanging ivory. He knew how to shoot anything, with no miscalculation, and could skin an animal so quickly and with such precision there was almost no blood in it. But he was just as keen not to shoot or kill, not if he didn’t have to, using his camera instead. Photographic safaris were a new idea then, and he believed cameras had the power to change hunting, the sporting idea of it. Hunters could
have
Africa without taking any of it away—without ruining it.

On safari, I saw Denys in sharper relief than I ever had. He had an infallible compass, and a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. More than anyone I’d known, Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend. I knew all this from my Lakwet days, but being with him helped me remember it, and feel it all again powerfully.

For most of a day we walked through alkali flats, the white crust like a frosted layer of salt that rose in a powder when your boots punched through. We wore the chalk on us everywhere—up to our knees, in the creases of our fingers clenching the rifle strap, down in the cavity between my breasts, and in my mouth, too. I couldn’t keep it out and stopped trying. I couldn’t keep anything out, I realized, and that was something I loved about Africa. The way it got at you from the outside in and never let up, and never let you go.

Denys was happy and cheerful all day, though he’d drunk most of the fifth of gin we’d shared the night before. It was a mystery to me, how he threw it off. His blood must have been thick indeed, for it carried enough malaria to sink an ox, and yet he never fevered and never went down. The sun was an anvil on the top of my head, shoulders, and neck, where fresh sweat poured and wetted my collar. My clothes hung on me, the wet salt from my body drying in rings. I was breathing hard, and hearing my own breath rise raggedly. But we had our distance to cover. What was tiredness? The porters moved ahead in a line, and when my vision blurred, the slim lines of their bodies against the great whiteness of the plain looked like human geometry. Limbs became sticks and sharp dashes, an equation of simple perseverance.

Just past midday, we stopped and rested in the muddled shade beneath a great baobab tree. It was squat and wide, with ribboning, undulating bark like a skirt of some sort, or like wings. This one hung with fruit in pale-brown drooping pods, and with the baboons feasting on them. Several sat on a branch over our heads, and we could hear them cracking open the fruit, a musical rattle, like maracas. A rain of the powdery meat fell on the ground around us, into the short yellow grass, and stray spat seeds, too, and baboon droppings, which smelled foul.

“We could move off,” Denys said when I grimaced, “or shoot them.”

I knew he wasn’t serious about the shooting, and joked, “Not on my account. I could probably lie down in the shit and drop off to sleep this minute.”

He laughed. “The physical effort changes you. You grow a tougher skin.”

“Mine was pretty tough to begin with.”

“Yes, I knew that straight away.”

I looked at him, wondering what else he’d felt when we first met—if he had sensed a jangling of recognition as I had, the sharp and familiar tolling of a bell, as if we were meant to know each other. “Did you ever imagine we might somehow end up here?”

“Under this terrible tree?” He laughed. “I’m not sure,” he said, as more dusty powder fell around us from above. “But I could grow to like it.”

By evening we’d reached the river and set up camp. We ate a young kudu that Denys had shot and skinned that morning, and then drank our coffee, staring into the fire as it snapped and spiralled, purplish smoke rising.

“Tania chased off a pair of lions once with only a rawhide whip,” he said. “She and Blix were on a cattle drive. He’d gone off to shoot something for their dinner when there was a loud commotion among the cattle. The porters scattered like mice, and it was only poor Tania standing there while each of the lions climbed up on the backs of their quarry. The rifles were packed away in the trunks, ridiculously enough.”

“So she whipped them away? That was brave of her.”

“Yes, she has even more courage than you’d think.”

We had been careful lately not to speak too much of Karen, for the farm had been sold, and it was clear she was going away. “You have plenty of reasons to love her,” I ventured.

“And admire her,” he said.

“Even better, for my money.”

“I would never have made her a good husband, though. She must have known that deep down.”

“It’s funny what we fight for, even when we know it’s impossible. Did she manage to save the oxen?”

“One, yes. The other they ate for dinner when Blix came back empty-handed.”

“It all worked out neatly then.”

“That time, yes.”

From far off, we heard the high monkeylike chirping of hyenas, the laughing you hear tell of, though it’s always sounded slightly mournful to me. The smoke billowed in a surge, as if it were trying to call out, too, to the horizon perhaps, or the just-stirring stars.

“It wouldn’t be such a bad life, you know, to be a lion,” Denys said. “The whole of Africa is his buffet. He takes what he wants, when he wants, without over-exerting himself.”

“He has a wife, too, though, doesn’t he.” It wasn’t a question.

“One wife at a time,” he clarified.

Then, while the fire rose and smoked and threatened to singe our feet, he spoke out Walt Whitman, because I asked him to. He said the words to me and to the stars while I grew more and more still. I was thinking about how I had struggled and strained for years, as Karen had, and towards things that were disastrous for me. And yet maybe that was unavoidable. The pilgrims and the lost often did look the same, as Denys had once told me, and it was possible everyone ended up in the same place no matter which path we took or how often we fell to our knees, undoubtedly wiser for all of it.

Barely seeming to move, Denys reached for my hand. With aching slowness he traced the fine bones and lines and ridges, the thickened flesh where I’d worked and worked. I thought of Karen with the rawhide whip. She was incomparably strong and courageous under her scarves and powder, her goblets and crystal and chintz. We had done a painful dance and lost a lot, we three, hurting one another and ourselves. But extraordinary things had happened, too. I would never forget any of them.

I think we sat like that for hours. Long enough for me to feel my own density settle more and more completely into the chalky dust. Aeons had made it, out of dissolving mountains, out of endlessly rocking metamorphosis. The things of the world knew so much more than we did and lived them more truly. The thorn trees had no grief or fear. The constellations didn’t fight or hold themselves back, nor did the translucent hook of the moon. Everything was momentary and endless. This time with Denys would fade, and it would last for ever.

“What are you thinking?” he asked me.

“Just of how much you’ve changed me.” I felt his lips on my neck, his breath. “This is why there is poetry,” I said, so softly I wasn’t sure he could hear me. “For days like these.”

T
hough I knew full well to expect it, I felt my stomach twist and my knees go soft to see Karen’s lovely furniture on the lawn and her books in crates. She was selling nearly everything, or giving it away—and I wrestled with the deep physical memory of watching Green Hills go piece by piece, just like this, while I looked on helplessly. Now that her land would go to others, she was trying to find a protected parcel for the Kikuyu who had been squatting on her property, so that they would have something for themselves that wouldn’t be taken away later. I found her wringing her hands over them and smoking, pacing a circle around her things.

“Now you have come, too,” she said. “So many visits and farewells, I don’t have any tears left for them.” Her white dress was loose around her breasts and legs, her straw hat abandoned on a chair. She looked young to me, suddenly.

“I could cry
for
you,” I said. “It wouldn’t take much.”

“Did you hear they’re going to hold a
ngoma
in my honour?” She waved away blue smoke. “Won’t that be something? There won’t be a dinner, though, like the one we had when the princes were here. All my things are crated.”

“I’m sure it will be wonderful all the same. They mean to celebrate you. You’ve made such an impression, and no one will soon forget you.”

“I’ve been dreaming about Denmark lately, and of standing on the bow of a great hulking ship, watching Africa grow smaller and smaller.”

“I hope you can come back one day.”

“Who has the privilege of knowing what’s possible, or the burden, for that matter? I can tell you, though, that I never thought I
could
leave. I think that’s what the dreams mean. I’m not leaving Africa, but slowly, ever so slowly, Africa has begun to seep out of me.”

I felt my throat constrict and swallowed against the knot. Her millstone table had been pulled out to the edge of the veranda. I’d always thought of it as the heart of Mbogani. The old granite was freckled and pitted and had borne how many brandy snifters or cups of tea, all her finery, the Sèvres and Limoges, Denys’s large feet, and his books and his hands. It was where she’d sat a thousand times, lighting a cigarette, shaking the match, and looking off into a middle distance, collecting herself. Gathering her wool scarf around her shoulders, preparing to speak.

It felt strange to be here with Karen and her vanishing farm, after all that had happened, the things that had drawn us together and pushed us apart. But the truth was it would have been even stranger not to come.

We sat down in two low rattan chairs, looking up at the five knuckled hills of the Ngong. “They say you’re learning to fly,” Karen said.

“Yes, it’s been such an important thing—and it’s made me so happy.”

“You’re twenty-eight?”

I nodded.

“That’s the age I was when I sailed for Kenya to marry Bror. How our lives turn and turn. Things come that we never would have predicted for ourselves or even guessed at. And yet they change us for ever.” She trailed her fingers in the grass, back and forth lightly and soundlessly. “I always wanted wings myself, you know…perhaps more than anything else. When Denys took me up the first time, we skimmed down over my hills, and then on to Lake Nakuru where thousands of zebras scattered under the shadow we made.”

“It’s the clearest feeling of freedom, isn’t it?” I asked her.

“Yes, but real clarity, too. I thought,
Now I see.
Only now.
From that great height all sorts of things that have been hidden show themselves. Even terrible things have a beauty and a shape.” She caught my gaze with her black, black irises and held it. “You know, Beryl, you’ll never truly have Denys. Not any more than I did. He can’t belong to anyone.”

My heart dropped then. “Oh, Karen…” I reached for words, but they weren’t anywhere to be found.

“I suppose I always knew you loved him, but kept it from myself for a long time. Perhaps you did, too.”

It felt so awful, hearing her strip the veil from years and years—and yet also necessary.
We should be telling the truth to each other,
I thought.
We’ve earned that, if nothing else.
“I didn’t mean to take anything from you,” I finally said.

“And you haven’t. No, it’s the gods who are punishing me for wanting too much.” She looked up at her hills again and then around at her things on the lawn. “Such happiness always comes with a price, and yet I would pay it all again and more. I wouldn’t take a single moment back, not even to save myself pain.”

“You’re the strongest woman I know,” I told her. “I’m going to miss you.” Then I leaned to kiss her on her cheek, just where her tears had come to blur the powder.